The Beginning of the End or the End of the Beginning?

Pluto returned to Capricorn last night for the first time since 1778. It's stay will initially be a brief one, offering only a taste of things to come, as it crosses back into Sagittarius during the period of its retrograde motion between mid-June and late November 2008. Then, on November 26, 2008, it will commence what I anticipate to be a sustained sixteen year period of deconstruction involving a wide range of terrestrial phenomenon, but principally those associated with current human conceptions of fear, scarcity, control, hegemony, economics, and the delicate balance between liberty and order. Given the economic storm clouds that everyone now acknowledges to be on the horizon, my guess is that we should expect conditions to become ever more worrisome over the next few years, as whatever bottoming-out process that is required unfolds – and Americans, and indeed, human beings everywhere, have the opportunity to identify those flawed assumptions and institutions that will have become obvious amidst the resulting rubble. How exactly this process will end is anybody's guess – but my bias is that a cosmos that is at all coherent, as it must be if the astrological paradigm is to have any validity whatsoever, is one that is impelling (though not compelling) all of life towards ever-higher levels of functionality.

If the Sun is only a star, and there are billions of stars in the heavens, it could be that human beings, and all the creatures and organisms with whom we share this planet, are an integral part of some vast cosmic experiment – an experiment of which we as yet know nothing. Although some among us have known moments of extraordinary clarity, and others even a presence that defies human comprehension, at the end of the day, it strikes me that we're all the family that our species can definitively and consistently know; and if we're going to prosper in this experiment, we have little choice but to begin working together. What of value do we have to lose, really? Our egos? Our periodic or even perpetual sense of alienation and separation? Our so-often pompous national or religious chauvinism? That dusty old volume of Ayn Rand? What?

As a final reflection on this momentus day, I offer this. What if the Deists were right about God having set the laws of nature in motion, and then having largely stepped away? Given the best science that we have available to us today, that certainly seems the most plausible scenario. But, if so, why could He/She/It have done this? Why leave such an extraordinary void? Might God have been eager to see how His creation would fill it? Could He have been anticipating, perhaps even expectating, that as our species matured we would get better at this, and ultimately make Him proud?